Chapter Text
An excerpt from the second volume of Fire and Blood, chapter sixteen: Aerys II. Provided to the Office of the Hand of the King for pertinent advisement on certain facts.
It is a historian’s greatest honor to be provided with living memory and accounts from peer and witness. Therefore I must thank chiefly the Citadel Archives of Grand Maesters, the archives of Casterly Rock, and others too numerous to name for providing a most personal accounting of the events, and even recounting certain information which has never been put to ink before.
The keen-eyed reader will of course understand that contradictions between one narrative and another may not be intentional deceit, merely fallible perception: for none may possess perfect knowledge but the Seven Who Are One.
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Childhood Love
In the course of creating the most complete history of the Targaryen dynasty, I am compelled to make a note regarding Lady Helaena Targaryen, eldest grandchild of Aegon the Unlikely.
Helaena and her daughter are inextricable from each other, and likewise from the Mad King’s madness.
Born at Raventree Hall in 243 AC, hers is a shadow that darkens Aerys’ entire reign.
The King and Queen sent congratulations in lavish gifts, but did not hold a feast as they later did for Prince Aerys’ birth.
Jaehaerys and Shaera must have felt great relief that Duncan’s child was a girl. Jaehaerys was sickly and weak; furthermore, taking his sharp-tongued sister to wife had not endeared him to his subjects. The shadow of the Blackfyres (born of a disinherited Targaryen line) still lingered across the sea, and some lords doubted Jaehaerys would be able to stand up to the threat. (Seventeen years hence, Jaehaerys’ stratagems from his sickbed would successfully put down the last Blackfyre Rebellion.)
Raised on the charity of her royal and noble relatives, Helaena grew into a quiet and modest child. She had purple eyes so dark some mistook them to be black, the same as her hair. But the true color always shone through in sunlight.
Courtesy named her Lady Helaena Targaryen, but smallfolk called her Lady Dragonfly, for she would inherit nothing from her father the Prince of Dragonflies.
Yet she and her family embraced the insult. For Helaena’s twelfth nameday, Duncan and Jenny gifted her a dragonfly pendant, on a fine silver chain. Helaena wore it always, never once seen without it— even in the bath.
Belos the Horn composed songs of her beauty and her tragedy, and her name survives in a common skipping rhyme: “Lord Bloodraven sees with a thousand eyes and one, but Lady Dragonfly sees nothing under the sun.”
In the year 253 she became a cupbearer for her grandmother Queen Betha. She became a favorite playmate for her cousin Princess Rhaella, and Prince Aerys became greatly fond of her as well.
Supposedly, Aerys begged his grandfather for Helaena’s hand instead. His affection persisted, even past his wedding.
Helaena, however, denied him.
Though he was a great lover of beauty, his attention was ever-fickle. Once he gained that which he desired, his mood soon turned from fascination to boredom. Helaena cannot have been ignorant of this.
Meanwhile, she encouraged a quieter affection from Tywin Lannister, the future Lord Paramount of the Westerlands.
Since the Targaryen dynasty so rarely married outside itself, Helaena’s lack of attachment and surfeit of proximity to power was attractive to suitors.
Prince Duncan had refused to allow even talks of betrothal while he was alive. After his death, the two may have believed their engagement possible, even imminent. Then Helaena’s legal guardianship passed into the hands of her uncle. King Jaehaerys forbade the marriage according to ancient Valyrian prophecy.
After the Tragedy of Summerhall, young Tywin brought her flowers and took her walking in Aegon’s Gardens “beneath the prince’s jealous eye”. Or so Belos the Horn claims. The writings of Pycelle say Aerys encouraged this, thinking it a favor to himself who so despised his cousin’s gloom.
Tragedy changed Helaena. Once quiet in her grandparents’ shadow, Helaena became greatly active in Court life. She acted as Jaehaerys’ most loyal scribe, speaking with the King’s voice when he had worn his own out from coughing. She befriended wives and women, ensuring courtiers’ loyalty to Jaehaerys and his heir through the Blackfyre crisis.
And when Aerys returned from the Stepstones a year later, glowing in knightly glory, she at last granted him the intimate favor he so desired.
It is unknown exactly when Aerys and Helaena’s affair began. Belos says the pair had been carrying on for many years in secret, despite Helaena’s public refusal. “The affection was plain to see, much even to those who did not know of the disdain in the Prince’s marriage. Helaena surely gave her maidenhood to her handsome cousin, and Aerys alone had the Lady’s affections till the day she died.”
However, it is indisputable that the affair became public knowledge upon the Prince’s return from the fifth and final Blackfyre Rebellion.
Yet, again, the manner and location are disputed. Pycelle says the kiss happened in the garden. They tried to obscure themselves from Princess Rhaella, but she learned of it anyway and left the party in a cold fury.
Belos (ever the dramatist) says the Prince drew Helaena up from her seat, only to kiss her passionately in front of his entire family.
Oddly enough, Lord Walter Whent’s letters to his wife Shella correspond with Belos’ account.
“I write to you with much news, not least of which that the Prince has taken a new paramour these last weeks. Though the hour was late and the light was dim, I saw him kiss Lady Dragonfly in full view of the royal table and his wife the Princess, who then left to nurse her babe and did not return.”
Princess Rhaella had the power to dismiss her own attendants, but not a ward of the crown. Still, she demanded Helaena be sent away. Tywin Lannister would not wed himself to spoiled goods, and in any case he left the Keep just a week after his arrival. The exact words said are not known, but it was clear to all that Tywin and Aerys’ friendship suffered greatly after this. They eventually reconciled, but their bond had been forever cracked by Helaena’s duplicity.
Six weeks later, Helaena wed Lord Robin Blackwood in the godswood at Raventree Hall. Only Queen Shaera and her ladies attended the ceremony.
Aerys wrote letter after letter to Raventree Hall. Eventually, he journeyed there in his full dignity as Prince of Dragonstone. Lord Blackwood hosted the prince with all respect and honor, throwing a grand feast on the night of his arrival. The new Lady Blackwood was ill that night, and did not attend. Aerys stayed for seven days and nights, and on the seventh night she granted him an audience. In Pycelle’s account she seduced him, assuring him that all would be well in time. Aerys departed the next morning.
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Reign of Indulgence
Four months into her marriage, a raven came to summon Helaena back to King’s Landing: for her uncle, the King, was dying.
Pycelle says Jaehaerys begged them to make peace in his last hours, while Belos says it was Lady Joanna Lannister who managed to reconcile the Princess with her cousin.
Newly King, Aerys exiled his mother to Dragonstone. The dowager Queen spent her final years wasting away in its cold and lonely halls. Pycelle says Helaena devised the exile, though Belos argues the dowager queen went quite willingly, having become despondent of what remained to her in the Red Keep.
Henceforth Helaena only left King’s Landing once a year, to mourn privately in the ruins of Summerhall.
Her lover kept her much occupied in his reign of indulgences: even granting her a seat upon the Small Council as his Mistress of Whispers. Helaena sat on the Small Council for five years, despite lacking accomplishment to justify such a great honor.
At first Ser Tywin, now the Hand of the King, tolerated her, for if Helaena was not present, Aerys did not even bother attending. (Perhaps because she was attending to him in his bedchambers.) Helaena effortlessly redirected him from some of his outlandish conceits, allowing Tywin to maintain order.
In 263, she argued so fiercely with Tywin that Tywin went to the King demanding he remove her from the Council’s affairs. Aerys, for his part, admonished her for her womanly vices, but refused to dismiss her.
At the beginning of the sixth moon of 266, two weeks before the seventh anniversary of her parents’ death, Helaena left King’s Landing for Summerhall once more.
This time, she never returned.
Her guard’s account is that she slipped on a rock inside the ruins, and her fall shook loose an already crumbling wall of stones to collapse on top of the guard himself. He was so injured it took days to reach a nearby village for help, and return the body to King’s Landing.
Aerys was devastated.
The King outlawed all from entering the ruins of Summerhall, and censured House Blackwood with a fine of 700 gold dragons per every year of Helaena’s marriage.
All the goldcloaks sworn to Helaena were stripped of rank and branded with hot irons. After that, they were shipped out of the Crownlands in a dung-cart, never to return to King’s Landing on pain of death.
Yet this was not to be the end of Helaena’s influence over the Mad King.
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The Bastard & the Prince
In 276, the King and his heir went to the Westerlands for the occasion of a tourney to celebrate the birth of Prince Viserys some months earlier.
Mid-route upon the Goldroad, Prince Rhaegar abruptly departed one morning with Oswell Whent, forcing the party to halt for three days. According to Pycelle’s writings, every day saw Aerys’ fury grow.
When the prince at last returned, Aerys roared at him for all to hear.
The prince, unaffected by the furious greeting, simply dismounted his horse. Quickly, the reason for his disappearance became known.
”Father,” Rhaegar said, “here you will see why the delay was necessary.”
Rhaegar plucked a child from his saddle, and set her on the ground before the King. She was small and undergrown, as ragged as any other beggar girl. But her hair curled silver-gold, and beneath the dirt, her skin seemed to be made from the finest ivory.
She showed the King a slim chain around her neck. Helaena’s dragonfly pendant caught the sunlight, and it glimmered in Aerys’ violet eyes.
No one had seen the king smile so brightly before, and none ever saw it again.
Aerys introduced Alysanne to Lannisport and all the tourney as his beloved daughter. She watched the tourney seated at the king’s left hand, and Prince Rhaegar carried her favor upon his lance. Though all paid her due respect, few nobles in attendance believed she was who the King claimed her to be.
Rumors mongered that Alysanne was a descendant of dragonseeds, having come into the necklace by petty theft and the Targaryen look by sheer luck. Her eyes were a deep, dark purple, just as dark as Helaena’s had been.
She was all the proof Aerys needed to destroy Lord Robin Blackwood. Aerys never hesitated when he found someone new to torment— and he believed Robin was responsible for Helaena’s death.
From Lannisport he ordered Lord Blackwood to come to the Red Keep and await the King’s return. One can only guess as to what the river-lord thought his fate would be.
Alysanne returned to King’s Landing with the royal party, and there became the charge of her aunt/stepmother Queen Rhaella.
When bid announce her, heralds named her Alysanne, Lady of Oldstones, the King’s Beloved Daughter.
Alysanne took all too readily to the lifestyle of a King’s daughter, and Aerys delighted in her the same way one would a pet monkey, often calling on her to sing for him and his attendants. Alysanne sometimes chattered about her childhood in the Riverlands, raised by a dwarf woman she called Ysilla or “The Woodmother”, but those stories ceased after she settled into the royal household. This mysterious Woodmother has never been found.
On His Grace’s behalf, Tywin Lannister petitioned the High Septon to have Alysanne formally legitimized and titled as a Princess of the realm.
However, His Holiness resisted, hoping to press the Crown for higher tithes and concessions. (No doubt he also desired to stay the prospect of yet another incestuous marriage.)
The matter persisted for two years more, until Aerys left the Red Keep to bring House Darklyn of Duskendale to heel.
In his immediate absence, the High Septon at last granted legitimacy and anointment of titles.
Alysanne Waters, Lady of Oldstones and the King’s Beloved Daughter, became Princess Alysanne Targaryen, entitled to all the privileges and duties expected of a trueborn daughter. At the same time, the Hand’s Office announced her betrothal to Tywin Lannister’s son and heir, Jaime.
The King and the Hand had already agreed upon it before Aerys’ departure. Yet once Aerys returned, he flung accusations of Tywin and Rhaegar conspiring against him. “You steal my daughter to steal my throne!” he bellowed.
Steffon Baratheon eventually pacified Aerys, convincing him he could find a bride for Rhaegar of a powerful Valyrian bloodline— and his grandsons would rule from within Casterly Rock itself.
No matter how much it hurt his pride, Aerys knew he needed Tywin. The betrothal stood, with the stipulation that Alysanne and Jaime would not wed until the girl was flowered.
Two years later, Rhaegar wed Elia of Dorne. Newly-knighted Ser Jaime and Princess Alysanne attended upon the groom and bride, and danced together at the opening feast. There, the two fell into an argument, and Alysanne stormed away from the dance altogether.
“I do not like him,” declared the Princess, “and he does not like me.”
Alysanne could not be ignorant of her father’s ways. It surely would please any spoiled child to bend the King to her every whim, and the bastard princess was no different. She purposely sought to break the betrothal.
The King’s solution to the problem will require its own chapter of this telling.